NY TIMES/ΑΠΟΚΑΛΥΠΤΙΚΟ

ΑΥΤΟ ΠΟΥ ΕΧΩ ΕΔΩ ΚΑΙ ΔΥΟ ΧΡΟΝΙΑ ΟΝΟΜΑΣΕΙ ΩΣ

ΟΠΛΟΠΟΙΗΣΗ ΤΗΣ ΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΑΣ

"ΟΠΛΟΠΟΙΗΣΗ ΤΗΣ ΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΑΣ"

Unidentified soldiers overran
Crimea in March 2014. Russia reclaimed the territory from Ukraine, and
President Vladimir V. Putin later admitted that the troops were Russian
special forces.Credit
Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

STOCKHOLM
— With a vigorous national debate underway on whether Sweden should
enter a military partnership with NATO, officials in Stockholm suddenly
encountered an unsettling problem: a flood of distorted and outright
false information on social media, confusing public perceptions of the
issue.

The claims were alarming: If Sweden, a non-NATO member, signed the deal, the alliance would stockpile secret nuclear weapons on Swedish soil; NATO could attack Russia
from Sweden without government approval; NATO soldiers, immune from
prosecution, could rape Swedish women without fear of criminal charges.

They
were all false, but the disinformation had begun spilling into the
traditional news media, and as the defense minister, Peter Hultqvist,
traveled the country to promote the pact in speeches and town hall
meetings, he was repeatedly grilled about the bogus stories.

“People
were not used to it, and they got scared, asking what can be believed,
what should be believed?” said Marinette Nyh Radebo, Mr. Hultqvist’s
spokeswoman.

As
often happens in such cases, Swedish officials were never able to pin
down the source of the false reports. But they, numerous analysts and
experts in American and European intelligence point to Russia as the
prime suspect, noting that preventing NATO expansion is a centerpiece of
the foreign policy of President Vladimir V. Putin, who invaded Georgia in 2008 largely to forestall that possibility.

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In
Crimea, eastern Ukraine and now Syria, Mr. Putin has flaunted a
modernized and more muscular military. But he lacks the economic
strength and overall might to openly confront NATO, the European Union
or the United States. Instead, he has invested heavily in a program of
“weaponized” information, using a variety of means to sow doubt and
division. The goal is to weaken cohesion among member states, stir
discord in their domestic politics and blunt opposition to Russia.

“Moscow
views world affairs as a system of special operations, and very
sincerely believes that it itself is an object of Western special
operations,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, who helped establish the Kremlin’s
information machine before 2008. “I am sure that there are a lot of
centers, some linked to the state, that are involved in inventing these
kinds of fake stories.”

The
planting of false stories is nothing new; the Soviet Union devoted
considerable resources to that during the ideological battles of the
Cold War. Now, though, disinformation is regarded as an important aspect
of Russian military doctrine, and it is being directed at political
debates in target countries with far greater sophistication and volume
than in the past.

Photo

Sweden’s defense minister,
Peter Hultqvist, last month at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. He has
tried to counteract disinformation that has threatened to sway public
debate in Sweden about a proposed military partnership with NATO.Credit
Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The flow of misleading and inaccurate stories is so strong that both NATO and the European Union have established special offices to identify and refute disinformation, particularly claims emanating from Russia.

The
Kremlin uses both conventional media — Sputnik, a news agency, and RT, a
television outlet — and covert channels, as in Sweden, that are almost
always untraceable.

Russia
exploits both approaches in a comprehensive assault, Wilhelm Urme, a
spokesman for the Swedish Security Service, said this year when
presenting the agency’s annual report. “We mean everything from internet
trolls to propaganda and misinformation spread by media companies like
RT and Sputnik,” he said.

The
fundamental purpose of dezinformatsiya, or Russian disinformation,
experts said, is to undermine the official version of events — even the
very idea that there is a true version of events — and foster a kind of
policy paralysis.

Disinformation most famously succeeded in early 2014 with the initial obfuscation about deploying Russian forces to seize Crimea. That summer, Russia pumped out a dizzying array of theories about the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
over Ukraine, blaming the C.I.A. and, most outlandishly, Ukrainian
fighter pilots who had mistaken the airliner for the Russian
presidential aircraft.

The
cloud of stories helped veil the simple truth that poorly trained
insurgents had accidentally downed the plane with a missile supplied by
Russia.

Moscow
adamantly denies using disinformation to influence Western public
opinion and tends to label accusations of either overt or covert threats
as “Russophobia.”

“There
is an impression that, like in a good orchestra, many Western countries
every day accuse Russia of threatening someone,” Maria Zakharova, the
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said at a recent ministry
briefing.

Photo

Debris from Malaysia Airlines
Flight 17, which was shot down over Ukraine in 2014 by insurgents using
a missile supplied by Russia. One of Russia’s theories was that
Ukrainian fighter pilots had downed the airliner after mistaking it for
the Russian presidential aircraft.Credit
Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

Tracing
individual strands of disinformation is difficult, but in Sweden and
elsewhere, experts have detected a characteristic pattern that they tie
to Kremlin-generated disinformation campaigns.

“The
dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on
Russia state media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that
kind of context,” said Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer.

“Then the fake document
becomes the source of a news story distributed on far-left or
far-right-wing websites,” he said. “Those who rely on those sites for
news link to the story, and it spreads. Nobody can say where they come
from, but they end up as key issues in a security policy decision.”

Although
the topics may vary, the goal is the same, Mr. Lindberg and others
suggested. “What the Russians are doing is building narratives; they are
not building facts,” he said. “The underlying narrative is, ‘Don’t
trust anyone.’”

The
weaponization of information is not some project devised by a Kremlin
policy expert but is an integral part of Russian military doctrine —
what some senior military figures call a “decisive” battlefront.

“The
role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals
has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of
weapons in their effectiveness,” Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the chief of
the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, wrote in 2013.

A
prime Kremlin target is Europe, where the rise of the populist right
and declining support for the European Union create an ever more
receptive audience for Russia’s conservative, nationalistic and
authoritarian approach under Mr. Putin. Last year, the European
Parliament accused Russia
of “financing radical and extremist parties” in its member states, and
in 2014 the Kremlin extended an $11.7 million loan to the National
Front, the extreme-right party in France.

“The
Russians are very good at courting everyone who has a grudge with
liberal democracy, and that goes from extreme right to extreme left,”
said Patrik Oksanen, an editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper group
MittMedia. The central idea, he said, is that “liberal democracy is
corrupt, inefficient, chaotic and, ultimately, not democratic.”

Another
message, largely unstated, is that European governments lack the
competence to deal with the crises they face, particularly immigration
and terrorism, and that their officials are all American puppets.

Photo

A NATO military exercise in
June in northern Poland. Around that time, articles on pro-Russia
websites suggested that NATO planned to store nuclear weapons in Eastern
Europe and would attack Russia from there without seeking approval from
local capitals.Credit
Adam Warzawa/European Pressphoto Agency

In
Germany, concerns over immigrant violence grew after a 13-year-old
Russian-German girl said she had been raped by migrants. A report on
Russian state television furthered the story. Even after the police debunked the claim, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, continued to chastise Germany.

In Britain, analysts said,
the Kremlin’s English-language news outlets heavily favored the
campaign for the country to leave the European Union, despite their
claims of objectivity.

In
the Czech Republic, alarming, sensational stories portraying the United
States, the European Union and immigrants as villains appear daily
across a cluster of about 40 pro-Russia websites.

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During
NATO military exercises in early June, articles on the websites
suggested that Washington controlled Europe through the alliance, with
Germany as its local sheriff. Echoing the disinformation that appeared
in Sweden, the reports said NATO planned to store nuclear weapons in
Eastern Europe and would attack Russia from there without seeking
approval from local capitals.

A poll this summer
by European Values, a think tank in Prague, found that 51 percent of
Czechs viewed the United States’ role in Europe negatively, only 32
percent viewed the European Union positively, and at least a quarter
believed some elements of the disinformation.

“The
data show how public opinion is changing thanks to the disinformation
on those outlets,” said Jakub Janda, the think tank’s deputy director
for public and political affairs. “They try to look like a regular media
outlet even if they have a hidden agenda.”

Not
all Russian disinformation efforts succeed. Sputnik news websites in
various Scandinavian languages failed to attract enough readers and were
closed after less than a year.

Both
RT and Sputnik portray themselves as independent, alternative voices.
Sputnik claims that it “tells the untold,” even if its daily report
relies heavily on articles abridged from other sources. RT trumpets the
slogan “Question More.”

Both
depict the West as grim, divided, brutal, decadent, overrun with
violent immigrants and unstable. “They want to give a picture of Europe
as some sort of continent that is collapsing,” Mr. Hultqvist, the
Swedish defense minister, said in an interview.

Photo

Mr. Putin in 2013 at the
state-funded television network Russia Today, now known as RT. The
network’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, center, said it sought to
provide “a perspective otherwise missing from the mainstream media echo
chamber.”Credit
Pool photo by Yuri Kochetkov

RT often seems obsessed with the United States, portraying life there as hellish. Its coverage of the Democratic National Convention,
for example, skipped the speeches and focused instead on scattered
demonstrations. It defends the Republican presidential nominee, Donald
J. Trump, as an underdog maligned by the established news media.

Margarita
Simonyan, RT’s editor in chief, said the channel was being singled out
as a threat because it offered a different narrative from “the
Anglo-American media-political establishment.” RT, she said, wants to
provide “a perspective otherwise missing from the mainstream media echo
chamber.”

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Moscow’s
targeting of the West with disinformation dates to a Cold War program
the Soviets called “active measures.” The effort involved leaking or
even writing stories for sympathetic newspapers in India and hoping that
they would be picked up in the West, said Professor Mark N. Kramer, a
Cold War expert at Harvard.

The
story that AIDS was a C.I.A. project run amok spread that way, and it
poisons the discussion of the disease decades later. At the time, before
the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, the Kremlin was selling communism as
an ideological alternative. Now, experts said, the ideological component
has evaporated, but the goal of weakening adversaries remains.

In Sweden recently, that has meant a series of bizarre forged letters and news articles about NATO and linked to Russia.

One
forgery, on Defense Ministry letterhead over Mr. Hultqvist’s signature,
encouraged a major Swedish firm to sell artillery to Ukraine, a move
that would be illegal in Sweden. Ms. Nyh Radebo, his spokeswoman, put an
end to that story in Sweden, but at international conferences, Mr.
Hultqvist still faced questions about the nonexistent sales.

Russia
also made at least one overt attempt to influence the debate. During a
seminar in the spring, Vladimir Kozin, a senior adviser to the Russian
Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank linked to the Kremlin and
Russian foreign intelligence, argued against any change in Sweden’s
neutral status.

“Do
they really need to lose their neutral status?” he said of the Swedes.
“To permit fielding new U.S. military bases on their territory and to
send their national troops to take part in dubious regional conflicts?”

Whatever
the method or message, Russia clearly wants to win any information war,
as Dmitry Kiselyev, Russia’s most famous television anchor and the
director of the organization that runs Sputnik, made clear recently.

Speaking
this summer on the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Information Bureau,
Mr. Kiselyev said the age of neutral journalism was over. “If we do
propaganda, then you do propaganda, too,” he said, directing his message
to Western journalists.

“Today,
it is much more costly to kill one enemy soldier than during World War
II, World War I or in the Middle Ages,” he said in an interview
on the state-run Rossiya 24 network. While the business of “persuasion”
is more expensive now, too, he said, “if you can persuade a person, you
don’t need to kill him.”